Sugarplum Fairy
by Sabrina Empress of Insanity
Summary: What could have made Drosselmeyer into the sadistic man he became? It begins once upon a time, with a young boy apprenticed to his uncle's clock shop...


_Author's Note: This is my second Secret Santa gift to elektra3 on LiveJournal. Happy Holidays!_

**Sugarplum Fairy**

Some dissertations hold forth that human beings are born neither good nor evil, and that only our environments can determine which path we shall choose. So if you look at things that way, it was all really Marie's fault.

Perhaps that might seem cruel to you; after all, she was only a young girl, an innocent bystander whose only crime was taking advantage of the free will she was gifted with. But you see those are only excuses, products of the imaginations of generations of children who were raised on out story which of course favored her and portrayed her in a much more positive and forgiving light…though, of course, most grew up knowing her under a different name.

What must be made clear first and foremost is that the ending of the story you know and love is not true in the slightest. Oh, there was magic, to be sure, and good versus evil and all of the things you expect from a truly wondrous fairy tale, but Marie never married the prince of the doll kingdom or her godfather's nephew; she never wanted him no matter what his capacity. And yet I believed that she did. I believed because I was told that she would love him.

But what true storyteller begins in the middle of the tale? How disappointing this must be for you. Therefore I beg your patience and offer in my defense only that the years have weakened my grasp of the passage of time until one moment seems to blend with another with no real definition or order. Indeed, such things no longer matter at all to me now, except in my head. There are, after all, certain advantages to no longer being confined to the mortal world.

So then, to begin at last; once upon a time there lived a young man who was apprenticed in his uncle's clock shop. The uncle was quite old and his family feared constantly that he should die if left to his own devices any longer, and so they sent the boy to be apprenticed to him both for the boy's sake and for his uncle's own. The boy loved his uncle and though he was fearful of leaving home so young, he marveled at the old man's deftness and skill with clockwork and the knowledge he so freely shared with the boy. And so the boy grew older until he had nearly reached adulthood, and he worked and learned until he could create clockwork marvels on par with his uncle's own masterpieces, and he became most accomplished in other areas as well that no one else knew he would be taught.

For you see, the boy's uncle was not just a mere clock maker. The old man was also a storyteller, and not of the variety you may be accustomed to for the stories he told were more real than others, and when he wrote them down as the author they were no longer merely stories but events that unfolded as he wrote. And the old man sensed, from the way his young nephew told his own tales to the children of the town when they came to the store, that the boy had such a gift as well. So even as he taught him that time was more than mere clockwork and that clocks were more than just tellers of time, he taught the boy that stories were not merely entertainment and fancy but something much, much more.

This took much more time to master than the boy's primary apprenticeship did and so he was content to leave the magic to his uncle and enjoy the old man's lessons as the gifts that they were. Yet as he had grown, there came to be restlessness within the boy's heart for he had spent nearly all of his life in the clock shop with very little contact with the world of his peers. His own brothers and sisters were much younger than he, which was why he had been the only one who could be sent to his uncle's shop as a child, the other clock makers that came to visit were all far older, and he had no friends his own age. The only glimpses he caught into the lives of other young men was when young couples in love would come to the shop to search for gifts for each other or their children. And so it was that while the boy loved his uncle and loved his work, he was sad and lonely; and so it was that his uncle took pity on the child he had raised as his own all those long years and took it upon himself to find the boy a wife.

The old man offered his nephew a chance at the heart of a young girl that he had known since her childhood but warned him it would be at a cost; for the girl was a princess in one of his old stories. To meet her, the boy would have to become part of the same story, but so deep was his loneliness that he agreed to his uncle's plan immediately. So the old man told him once more the tale that the boy had been raised on, of a kingdom far away where the old man had been a magician in a great court until his folly at listening to the king's orders had let to a curse that befell the princess and which no one had yet to break.

The boy found himself transported to another land, where he had been told to use his wiles and cleverness to break the curse set upon the princess of the land that the old man had once belonged to. The old man escorted him to the palace himself, where they were welcomed warmly but with little hope. The princess, they explained, could only be cured by eating a certain kind of nut that was cracked and handed to her by a young man who had never shaved, had worn boots since birth, and would afterwards be able to step backwards seven steps without stumbling. The boy immediately knew why his uncle had brought him there, for the town in which he had been born was very cold and almost never without snow so that every child was fitted with boots upon their birth; he was still young enough that he had never yet had the need to shave; and his years of working in the clock shop had given him a steadiness about him sadly absent from most young men of his years. The boy was brought before the princess, a poor girl who had been turned most hideous by the curse, with large teeth and a head thrice its normal size, studied the nut with the same care and attention that he did his own apprentice work, and at last used the small tool clock maker's used to lock the gears of clocks into place to crack the nuts.

So the princess ate the nut and became beautiful again, so much so that her beauty staggered the boy to his core. But this was to be his undoing, for in his awe he forgot to watch his step as he began to walk backwards and accidentally trod upon the tail of a mouse. Immediately the same curse that had befallen the princess fell upon him, for the mouse was truly the Mouse Queen, who had so cursed the kingdom before, in disguise as a simple dormouse. The moment the curse descended, the princess recoiled in horror and would have nothing to do with the boy who was now a nutcracker, for he was too ugly to comprehend.

The old man who was the boy's uncle was heartbroken at this disaster and immediately stole the nutcracker boy back to the world into which he had been born, overcome with sorrow and guilt at the tragic turn of events. He cared for the nutcracker as he had for the boy, and ached, and wept, and begged for his forgiveness. He promised his nephew that he would return him to his human form somehow, that he would write out the story that would transform him the moment he knew what to write, and find him a love that was not so untrue.

At last, it came to him. The old man had a goddaughter a few years younger than his nephew, a sweet, good-natured girl of virtue and imagination that he loved as dearly as his own children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews. The girl was named Marie and her loving and forgiving nature made the old man certain that she would be able to fall in love with his nephew, no matter if he were a wooden nutcracker or his own usual pale, stoop-shouldered, but good-hearted and noble self. So the old man began to write, and on Christmas when he went to visit the family and his goddaughter, he brought the nutcracker that was his nephew to her as a gift.

The story the old man wrote was most enrapturing, with adventure and a battle with the Mouse Queen's army all designed to make the young girl Marie feel the stirrings of emotion and pity towards her new toy. Only when the old man was sure that she felt sorrow for the nutcracker that he told her the tale of the princess and the curse on his nephew. And of course Marie, being the virtuous and loving girl that she was, took pity on the poor nutcracker and told him that if someone was truly so brave and good as to save such an ungrateful princess, she would love him no matter what he looked like.

In that moment, the spell was broken and the nutcracker vanished as the boy was returned to his uncle's side. But alas, the old man had not written an ending to the story. He had only written everything until the moment he told her of the nutcracker's plight, but nothing beyond. And so when he presented his nephew to Marie expectantly, with the boy's eyes alight with joy at the anticipation that such a lovely and sweet girl would love him, she spoke to him politely and kindly but nothing more. You see, she had not promised to love him, but only someone like the boy in the story she had been told, she did not recognize the boy as the nutcracker from the story, and because the old man had left the end of the story open so that she could love his nephew without any coercion, she did not love him at all.

And so it was that the boy was broken.

The boy left his uncle's shop amidst the old man's pleas and apologies and left for a city far, far away from him and the memories of the girls who had betrayed him. When he found a new place where no one knew of his sad tale, he wanted nothing more than to start over as if nothing had ever happened, but he did not have the skills to do so. After all, he was still a young man and all he knew was how to work with clockwork, nothing more. The boy who was now a young man opened his own clock shop in the new town where he had made him home and began to live his life as if his former history had never occurred.

Yet the young man's uncle still felt sorrow at the loss of his nephew and so did something he had never dared to do before; he completed the story he had written about the boy and Marie and submitted it to be published under a false name. In time, the book made its way to the town where the young man had escaped to, and when the young man learned of its existence he was filled with righteous anger. The people of the town were frightened of his wrath, for until that day they had only seen their clock maker as a calm, quiet, and mysterious if unhappy man who never raised his voice. When his temper showed no signs of abating, they began to avoid coming to his shop, until one day he disappeared from the town altogether.

As the young man prepared to run away again, however, a thought occurred to him. He had blamed his uncle for his misfortunes for a long time, and in a way the old man was to blame, but in reality it was the girl's fault for not conforming to the role she had been assigned. If only his uncle had not been so foolish as to believe that free will would lead to happiness! Being allowed to make her own choices had led Marie to break the young man's heart and make all of his struggles and agonies for naught. If the story had been written properly, with a true ending, then she would have had no choice but to love him as they had hoped.

And so even as he started over in a new town, as a clock maker once again, the man began to tell stories again, stories with endings that were complete and left no room for free will. And as time went on he began to conceive of more tragic tales, ones where the emotions and happiness of other characters fell at the expense of others, where their free will was punished most horribly. When the characters began to rebel in their worlds, he would write their stories down to exert greater control over them, and he reveled in their agony as they struggled against his will that was imposed upon them. Their pain was vengeance against Marie, always against Marie, and her daring in ignoring the story and going her own way.

And then long, long ago, the man died, leaving behind his old clock shop and one last unfinished story. But he did not stop telling it. He did not abandon his greatest tragedy. In death he had learned that he could transcend the limitation of the mortal world, and only now could he truly bring his stories to life.

But of course, you know, there is no record of this part of Drosselmeyer's life; save, however, for this one which you read this very moment.

So you see now, don't you? You understand everything now, I am sure. I simply cannot be held accountable.

It was all Marie's fault.


End file.
